The Moors Last Sigh

we do not like tobacco or babies, and around here everyone is crazy about both. Smokers are always going on about the social joys to be had from their packets of Fortuna or Ducados, about the intimate sensuality of lighting a friend’s cigarette; but we detest waking up with that cloying smell on our clothes, or going to sleep with stale smoke clouding our hair. As to children, you’re supposed to think you can never have too many of them, but we have no desire to be trapped by a brood of bouncing, squealing little jailers. And, if I may say so, we like your pet precisely because he is stuffed and therefore needs no attention from us.’
    ‘Yet you have looked after me royally,’ I argued.
    ‘That is business,’ Felicitas rejoined. ‘You are a paying guest.’
    ‘Surely there must be men who would love you for yourselves, without wanting to raise families,’ I persevered. ‘And if the men in Benengeli have the wrong politics, why not go across to Erasmo, for example? I hear they are different there.’
    ‘Since you are so forward as to demand an answer,’ replied Felicitas, ‘I have never met a man who could see a woman as herself. And as to Erasmo: there is no road to Erasmo from here.’
    I caught an odd expression in Renegada’s eye. Perhaps she did not agree with everything her sister had said. After that conversation I would allow myself to imagine, during my solitary nights, that at any moment the door might open and Renegada Larios might slip in beside me in my cot, naked below her long white nightdress … but it never happened. I lay by myself, listening to the shifts and murmurs just above my unsleeping head.

    During my month of waiting I wandered the streets of Benengeli – sometimes trundling Jawaharlal behind me, but more often by myself – in the grip of a numbing tedium that somehow made it impossible for me to dwell on the past. I wondered if I had acquired the same empty-eyed look that characterised so many of the so-called Parasites, who seemed to spend all their days crowding and jostling up and down ‘their’ Street, buying clothes, eating in restaurants and drinking in bars, talking furiously all the time, with a curious absentness of manner that suggested their utter indifference to the topics of their conversations. However, Benengeli was apparently capable of weaving its spell even on those who were not dull of eye, because whenever I chanced to pass that old slobberer Gottfried Helsing he twinkled at me brightly, gave me a cheery wave and cried, with a knowing wink, ‘We really must have another of our excellent conversations some time soon!’ as if we were the best of friends. I surmised that I had arrived at a place to which people came to forget themselves – or, more accurately, to lose themselves in themselves, to live in a kind of dream of what they might have been, or preferred to be – or, having mislaid what once they were, to absent themselves quietly from what they had become. Thus they could either be liars, like Helsing, or near-catatonics, like the ‘honorary Parasite’, the ex-mayor, who sat motionless on an outdoor bar stool from morning to night, and never spoke a word; as if he were still lingering in the shaded solitude of an alcove concealed behind a large wooden almirah in the house of his dead wife. And the air of mystery surrounding the place was in fact an atmosphere of unknowing; what seemed like an enigma was in fact a void. These uprooted drifters had become, by their own choice, human automata. They could simulate human life, but were no longer able to live it.
    The locals – or so I guessed – were less befuddled by the town’s narcotic quality than the Parasites; but the prevalent mood of vacuous alienation and apathy did affect them to some degree. Felicitas and Renegada needed to be asked three times about the visit to Benengeli of the young woman, mentioned by Gottfried Helsing, who had been asking after Vasco Miranda not long ago. On the first two occasions they shrugged and reminded me that Helsing was not to be trusted; but when I returned to the subject one evening, Renegada looked up from her sewing and burst out, ‘Oh, yes, my goodness, now that I think of it, a woman did come – a bohemian type, some sort of art specialist from Barcelona, a picture restorer, or something similar. She got nowhere with her coquettish ways; and by now she must be safely back in Catalonia where she belongs.’ Once again I had the strong